Exchange 2010 offers a whole lotta new features and functionality, but Microsoft chose to sacrifice a few things along the way — such as backwards compatibility with older versions of Exchange. Having just attended a session overview at TechEd in Los Angeles, it is painfully obvious that if you are thinking of moving to Exchange 2010, you will need to take a class first, read a book, play with the beta (or hire a consultant). Having said that, here are a few tidbits from the session, lead by Ross Smith, senior technology architect for Microsoft.
Microsoft is relying heavily on the a three tier system, the Exchange Server, the Outlook client (in many forms) and a tier called the Client Access Server. CAS helps virtualize many tasks that once burdened the Exchange Server, and can live on Hyper-V (or other hypervisors) but can’t talk with older versions of Exchange except by boiling the connection down to the least common denominator, SMTP.
For large rollouts (more than eight Client Access Servers) or for rollouts in conjunction with Microsoft OCS, the software load balancing that comes with Windows operating systems won’t cut it. Microsoft says you’ll need hardware load balancing.
Thanks to a new method of continuous backup protection called Shadow Redundancy — which aims to limit the number of writes to the hard disk by creating duplicates of every message while that message is in transport — Microsoft recommends using direct attached storage with Exchange servers. (What? No giant SAN system for new Exchange rollouts? This must be Microsoft’s way of saying, “Take that, EMC.”)
If using the Unified Messaging feature, forget about using virtualization, Hyper-V or otherwise, or even co-locating Exchange with other Exchange components on the same physical server. Audio message quality could be impacted.
All aspects of capacity planning have changed from the recommended number of servers per user to the maximum recommended RAM.
To determine how many Exchange 2010 servers are required to manage user load, Microsoft offers the following capacity planning tools:
- Exchange Server 2010 Beta Protocol Documentation Set
- Microsoft Exchange Load Generator
- Infrastructure planning and design guide
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